building for app-stores is also kinda niche sorta these days. most businesses want to be on the web mainly with a presence the app stores. i make about $10k each month with Red Goose [1] with focus on the app stores.
What I'm building and noticing on other macOS developers are system utilities, that have no web equivalent. Things like window managers, app switchers, clipboard history, hardware controllers etc.
It's a smaller niche, but closer to the users. It makes a dev feel like less of a cog in a big system, and more of a craftsman giving people a way to solve their frustrations.
By the way, do you think noiseblend.com would fit into Red Goose? I tried both Ionic and Cordova but there were two big disadvantages to them:
- way too much work to pack a Webpack+Next.js+React frontend into an app (and I didn't want to sell it, so not much incentive to put in that work)
- both were still using older WebViews on iOS instead of the newer WKWebView and the memory requirements of Noiseblend triggered iOS OOM killing the app
I like to keep all my app specific developer controls (UX/UI, functionality etc.) in my web-app and put in only very specific native modules that an appstore forces me to use.
NoiseBlend should be an easy conversion from what I can see prima-facie.